Beacon
by Recursive Sweatpants
Summary: Three friends find themselves stranded in a mysterious world made out of blocks. With only the memories of their names and each other, they discover that they can shape the landscape and build fantastic things. As they try to piece together who they are and what this strange place is, they build a tower to the heavens and discover a malevolent force hellbent on destroying them.


_There was only them, and their algorithm, and the darkness._

_Down they went, deeper and deeper into the darkness. Spiraling was the tunnel they descended, going forward, left, back, right, and above all, _down_. The algorithm was burned clear into their minds: down one, forward one, down one, forward one, down one, turn left, repeat. They walked the perimeter of the same three-by-three square, going absolutely nowhere but down. Once, long ago, they might have put a torch on the wall to light the way, but they ran out so very quickly._

_Now, there was only them, and their algorithm, and the darkness._

_They clasped hands, the three of them. They could no longer see. All they had was the algorithm, and each other. The vile stone scraped against them. It used to be red, until the darkness colored it black. It was sweltering to the touch._

_They had given up on talking a while ago. The darkness held at their throats, daring them to make a sound. They knew better than to challenge it. The only sounds were the popping of the vile stone as the Guardian made his way, and the quiet, tremendous rumbling from the world they had abandoned above. They had ran out of things to say anyway._

_The Guardian worked tirelessly. Down one, forward one, down one, forward one, down one, turn left, repeat. A pickaxe made of lies in one hand, the warmth of a friend in the other. His motions were automatic. He had been doing them for what felt like an eternity. Normally this was bad practice; he should be digging the ceiling out, so that stairs could be placed in later. That didn't matter now, though, as, there was no reason to ever climb back up. He had given up wondering if he was dreaming a long time ago, even though he never needed to sleep. All he had were his friends, and his algorithm, and his smelly green jacket._

_The Prospector connected the Guardian and the Architect, and in return he used their arms to balance himself as he descended each step. He could no longer see it, but he felt every bit of stone left behind as the Guardian continued his algorithm. Useless, it had seemed; there was so much of it, so very much. Enough to fill a continent, to form mountains and valleys and cliffs. What harm could there be in chucking some of it away? But now he had picked up as much as he could carry, and quietly mourned the stone that was left behind, destined to disappear forever. All he had were his friends, and his treasure, and his old yellow shirt._

_The Architect trailed behind the Prospector and the Guardian; the closest to their impending doom, the first to disappear should their pitiful attempt to prolong their lives inevitably fail. His hubris had led them to this. They were so very far _down_ now. And it was all his fault. He felt a squeeze from the Prospector, and saw his friend's gaze pierce through the darkness at him. The Prospector and the Guardian had already consoled him. Forgiven him. But that did not alleviate all of the guilt, as they were still doomed because of him. All he had were his friends, and his mistake, and his favorite black hat._

**(~⊙⊙⊙~)**

Eddy awoke with a gasp.

His his mind raced. His head felt like it would explode. He stood up, eyes clenched shut and hands clamped to his temples as the blood rushed to his brain.

_Gold! Treasure! Freedom! Too much! Too much! You need to smelt it, stupid! Underground! I won't lose my name! Sharp as diamonds! My name is Eddy! My name is Eddy! I had freedom! I had... total freedom! They're formed by tons of heat and pressure. I had… I had… I am…_

After a few seconds of agony, his thoughts slowed down to the point where he could actually understand them, but they still flurried around in his head. He opened his eyes, and then his mouth.

"Why's everything all blocky?"

The storm of random babbling in his head ground to a stop. At last, Eddy regained control of his thoughts, and focused on the question he had just blurted out loud.

He stood in the middle of a large forest. At least, he _figured_ it was a forest. It was more like what a forest would look like if some kid had built it out of blocks. It was blocky. Every single thing around him was made out of perfectly square cubes, each one large enough to come up to his chest. The ground around him was perfectly flat, stretching around him for a few blocks until it hit a layer of grassy blocks on top of it to form a 3-D, pixelly hill. The "trees" were made out of brown, wood-textured blocks, their trunks a single block wide and several blocks tall. The trunks sprouted into bunches of green blocks, which were filled with holes to look like cubes of branches and leaves.

Eddy's gaze turned upward, where a bright blue sky greeted him. A few clouds passed overhead—at least, they were gigantic, rectangular shapes that he guessed were trying to _resemble_ clouds, anyway. Above them, a bright, yellow square lay plastered to the sky, sending sunlight down to the blocky world below.

"Ooookay, then," Eddy mumbled to himself. "What the heck _is_ this pl-"

"AAAAAUUUGHH!"

Someone tackled the boy to the ground with a scream. In reflex, Eddy kicked his attacker in the gut.

"Oof!"

Double-D coughed, and rolled off of Eddy onto the ground.

"Double-D?" Eddy asked, pushing himself off the ground to his feet. Though the "grass" beneath him was completely flat, it felt cool and moist. He turned to see his friend writhe on the ground, clutching his gut as he groaned.

Double-D opened his eyes, and let out a small gasp. "E-Eddy?" A look of horror spread across his face.

"What the heck Double-D? What'd _I_ do?" Eddy yelled. Double-D trembled on the ground a little, his eyes beginning to mist. With a sigh, Eddy bent down and offered a hand. "A little early for going cannibal, don'tcha think?"

Double-D took his hand, and Eddy helped the boy to his feet. "I-I-I-I h-have no idea wh-what came over me!" he sputtered. "I-I just woke up after… after some sort of _exhausting_ dream, and wh-when I saw you, I-I c-couldn't help myself! I-I-I j-just… I just…" he looked around, as if noticing the weirdness of the place for the first time. "Wh-what in blazes _is_ this pl-"

"AAAAAAUUUGGHH!"

Eddy braced for another assault. An arm wrapped around him, sweeping him off the ground and into Double-D in a massive hug.

"E-EEEEED!" Double-D choked. "AIR! AIR!"

Eddy seconded the motion, pushing away from Ed as hard as he could. Ed held them in his strangle-hug for a few seconds before finally dropping them to the ground, panting and coughing.

"Good _lord_, Ed!" Double-D spat. "That was worse than usual! What's gotten into you?"

Ed stared at them blankly, blinking his right eye, and then his left. "I don't remember," he uttered.

"Well, _that's_ no surprise," Eddy scoffed. He snorted, lowering his eyebrows as he thought to himself. His eyes widened. "Wait… I don't remember how we got here either!"

"I… I can't seem to recall what happened myself," Double-D said. His eyes began shifting around rapidly, and he placed a hand to his temple. "In fact, I-I can't seem to remember anything! W-where do I live? What do my parents look like?!" His breaths grew short and panicked. "I-I-I c-can't remember anything at all!"

"Easy there, Sockhead," Eddy said. "You probably just…" as he spoke, Eddy tried to remember his own hometown, and drew a blank. He tried to remember his house, but only found a blur. "I… can't remember anything either. Weird!" He looked up at his friends, and said, "Well, I remember _you_ guys. I think."

"You're right", Double-D said. "I'm Eddward-Double-D-you're Eddy, and you're Ed-"

"-That's my name!" Ed chirped.

"-and I know we're friends. Or at least, I think we are, my erratic behavior earlier notwithstanding. That's all I can seem to remember."

"Same here," Eddy said. He turned to Ed. "I'm guessing you don't know anything we don't, eh?"

The boy stared at them blankly again, blinking his eyes out of sync. His unibrow scrunched together, and his gaze turned to the ground. "I feel like I'm missing someone," he said. He clenched his eyes shut, and his voice began to waver. "S-someone needs me, b-but... I can't…"

Double-D placed a hand on Ed's shoulder. "Don't worry, fellows. Transient global amnesia is often temporary. The fact that I remembered that means that we have most of our non-personal crystallized intelligence intact, which is a good sign. I'm sure we'll naturally get our memories back in time."

"In the meantime," Eddy said, "let's talk about the next big question." He turned around and spread his arms out at the sparse, blocky forest in front of him "What the heck _is_ this place?!"

"That is a very good question," Double-D said. He walked up to a tree and placed a hand on it. His eyes widened. "It looks impossibly flat, yet I can feel the texture of bark beneath my fingers. I can't tell if it's actually wood, or some sort of cubic simulacrum."

Eddy stepped forward, and inspected one of the blocks of grass layered on top of the ground to make the landscape "slope" upward. The top of it was perfectly flat, but when he placed his hand on it, he could feel individual blades beneath his fingers. He pinched and groped to try to grab one, but his eyes told him that he was just rubbing them across a flat block. He shifted his attention downward to the side of the block. The grass stretched down a few inches from the top before morphing into dirt. He placed his hand to that, and the texture changed to a moist, grainy feel. He pressed his hand into the dirt and rubbed it, but when he looked at his palm, it was clean.

"This is so weird," he said.

_Bup-bup-bup-bup-bup-bup-bup-bup…._

A hollow knocking sound filled the air. Eddy turned to Double-D, who mirrored his curious face, and the two of them turned to Ed. The boy was knocking on one of the tree trunk blocks with his fist.

"Ed, what're you-?" Eddy cut himself off, as he noticed that large, conspicuous cracks began to form on the side of the block. They started from the center, and slowly grew outward toward the block's edges.

_Bu-POP!_

The tree trunk block disappeared in a small shower of wooden particles, leaving behind a perfect cube of empty air.

"Oh my!" Double-D gasped, leaping towards Ed to inspect the now-missing tree block. "Ed, what did you do?"

"I-I dunno!" Ed said. "Did I do something wrong?"

"I… I don't know!" Double-D shouted back. He took a step back and examined the tree. Even though the second-to-bottommost block of its trunk was missing, the blocks above it were completely still. The rest of the tree was floating in the air. "Oh, my."

Ed took note of Double-D's confused and almost frantic face, and started panicking himself. Eddy saw him look to his right, and Ed perked up as he noticed something behind the tree.

"Ooh! Ooh! I can fix it!" Ed shouted. He dove toward his right and picked the something off the ground.

Double-D and Eddy watched in awe as Ed held in his hands a miniature tree trunk block. It was no more than a few inches across, and it floated above his hands a tiny bit, gently bobbing up and down and spinning slowly in place.

"Wh-what on earth?"

"He didn't just make the block disappear," Eddy said. "Ed, you took it!"

"I'm sorry! I-I'll put it back!" Before Eddy could reject, Ed took the block and thrust it at the empty space beneath the floating tree. With a soft _blup_, the tree trunk block simply reappeared, restored to its full size. However, it was _sideways_; the bark went across instead of up-and-down, and on one side Eddy could see the wood's square-shaped rings.

"W-well, that just happened," Double-D deadpanned.

"Dude, Ed!" Eddy said, "Do it again!"

Ed cast a confused look at Eddy, and then turned to Double-D.

"I-I…." Double-D's eyes shifted around in thought, and with a shrug, he blurted, "Do it again?"

Ed almost instantly smiled, and began knocking on the sideways log again. With every tap, cracks appeared in the block and grew larger. When they reached the edges, the log popped out of existence, just as before. A tiny version of it appeared in its place, shooting gently into the air and landing a few feet away. It floated just a few inches above the ground like it did in Ed's hands, and when Ed got close to it, it flew up on its own into his grasp.

"Interesting," Double-D said. His face began to warm up, and he started tapping on a nearby block of grass with a tentative fist. "Does this mean we can-?" With a crunch, the grass block disappeared much quicker than the wood block did. Its tiny counterpart jumped straight into the air and flew towards Double-D before it hit the ground. "O-oh, indeed! It seems we can harvest and replace blocks in this place!" He excitedly started hacking away at another grass block, while Ed began breaking apart the rest of the tree.

With an interested "Huh", Eddy started knocking on a grass block himself. When it broke, he felt it fly into his hand. Strangely, the miniature block didn't have grass on top of it; it was pure dirt.

Eddy broke another grass block. To his surprise, when it flew into his hand, it appeared to merge with the first block. His hairs began to stand on end. Something appeared in his mind, a thought that wasn't entirely his own.

_Two dirt._

Eddy flinched. His hands flew apart, and the mini dirt block seemed to vanish. Its image appeared in his head, though; he had two blocks of dirt.

Placing a hand to his head, Eddy started digging at more grass blocks. As each one broke and its miniature flew toward him, the count in his head increased.

_Four dirt. Five dirt. Six dirt. One log._

Eddy began breaking apart a tree. When he collected its blocks, their image appeared next to the image of the dirt, along with their number.

"Man, that's weird," he said.

"I presume that you too are confronted with a disturbingly persistent and accurate mental representation of the assets you have acquired?" Double-D asked.

"If you mean there's a picture of what blocks I have and how many there are stuck in my head, then yeah."

"It would seem that we are also able to 'select' blocks to place," Double-D continued. He held out a hand, the palm facing upwards, and a dirt of block appeared over it. Almost instantly, it changed to a log block, then back to dirt, then to nothing.

"Whoa, lemme try." Eddy held up an empty hand to eye level. He focused on the image in his head, on the dirt block. An instant later, the block appeared above his hand, floating and turning slightly on it. When he focused on the log block in his head, the block in his hand changed to match.

"Hey guys!" Ed shouted, "Look what I made!"

Eddy and Double-D turned to Ed, who stood proudly before a small tower of dirt in the middle of the clearing no more than three blocks high.

"Th-that's nice, Ed," Double-D said.

"Hey, I bet we could build a sick fort outta all this!" Eddy said. He scrambled toward Ed and his dirt tower and held a dirt-block-filled hand toward the side of it. A full-sized dirt block appeared next to the third block up.

"Oh, before then, though," Double-D said, making his way to the tower himself, "I would like to test something."

He started knocking on the top dirt block of the tower.

"Don't you like it?" Ed asked, a large frown growing on his face as it sank.

"Y-yes, of course! But I just need to see if…." The block broke, leaving nothing connected to the the block that Eddy placed. Ed quickly forgot his sadness to make a face of awe. The block of dirt hung in the air, perfectly one block's-length above and beside the second block of the tower, where both of their edges touched. Double-D broke that block as well, leaving Eddy's block completely separate in all directions.

"Amazing!" Double-D shouted in awe. Putting a hand on the block, he began to push on it. It did not budge a single inch. After pushing as hard as he could, Double-D gave up, and smiled. "Gentlemen, I believe it's safe to say that certain laws of physics do not seem to apply here."

"Gee," Eddy scoffed, "Who woulda thought _that_?" He pointed a thumb back at the first tree Ed broke. Most of its trunk was missing thanks to Ed, but the top few blocks he couldn't reach and the leaves attached to them still hung in the air.

"It helps to be thorough, Eddy," Double-D retorted. "Of course, normally I would be very skeptical about all of this, but for some reason… it just doesn't seem all that unnatural!"

Suddenly, the world began growing darker. The Eds turned to see the square sun dipping into the horizon, its movement visible to the naked eye. "Uh, it's not _that_ not-unnatural," Eddy warned.

"Sunset already?" Double-D asked. "It can't have been ten minutes since we woke up, and I explicitly remember it being noon when I came to."

The sky turned a dark blue as the sun dipped below the horizon, taking red and orange sky around it down as well. The clearing grew dark, and Eddy immediately felt the temperature drop a few degrees.

"Huh," Eddy said. He turned toward Double-D, and asked, "So, what're we gonna do?"

Double-D placed a hand on his chin, and scrunched his eyebrows together in thought. "I'm not sure. Normally, I would say we should find a means as to ascertain our location and find our way to civilization, but it's painfully clear that this is no place on Earth."

Eddy took note that Ed's eyes grew to the size of dinner plates, his hands raising to his cheeks as his mouth began to widen into an enormous smile. Before the boy could open his mouth, Eddy quickly clamped his lips shut.

"So we're on another planet?" Eddy asked, reveling in how Ed completely deflated with a muffled whine.

"Unless that planet routinely defies the laws of physics, I wouldn't be too skeptical to think that we may not be in our own _universe_."

With a raised eyebrow, Eddy released his grip on Ed's lips, letting the boy flop forward onto the ground. "Wow, Sockhead. Just going with the sci-fi explanation right off the bat?"

"I just can't think of anything else!" Double-D explained, raising his hands in the air. "A landscape made entirely out of perfect cubes which, when knocked on, turn into smaller, partially-tangible forms that can be inexplicably replaced with a gesture, phantom textures on said blocks, and a mental inventory system for them? _This_?" He gestured toward the floating block of dirt. "The only explanation outside of some sort of physics augmentation or virtual reality—which is a possible explanation, mind, but even with amnesia I know that it is so far out of our current technological capacity that the only explanation for _that_ would be equally out there—is that we are in an entirely different reality alto-"

"Mmuuuurrrrggghhh…"

The Eds froze. A moan wafted through the air, ending in a gnarly growl. The three of them turned toward the source of the sound.

A figure walked toward them. Its head was a cube. Its body, a rectangle. It was like a stick figure from a road sign, but more square. Its face was nearly blank, nothing but two murky rectangles where its eyes should be and a dark shade of green between them giving the impression of a nose. It "wore" tattered jeans and a light blue shirt, though the clothes might as well have been painted on for how flat they were on its body. Its legs swung back and forth in a crude walking motion, like pendulums. Even though its "feet" hardly touched the ground, the thing moved toward them at a steady pace, its arms outstretched.

A single word escaped from the boys' mouths.

"ZOMBIE!"


End file.
